158. If the atmosphere rotated with a spherical Earth effects would be noticeable with fireworks, rain and hot-air balloons

"If “gravity” magically dragged the atmosphere along with the spinning ball Earth, that would mean the higher the altitude, the faster the spinning atmosphere would have to be turning around the center of rotation. In reality, however, if this were happening then rain and fireworks would behave entirely differently as they fell down through progressively slower and slower spinning atmosphere. Hot-air balloons would also be forced steadily faster Eastwards as they ascended through the ever increasing atmospheric speeds."

Dubay is getting very confused.  However there are  things that would affect a hot-air balloon, fireworks  and rain as they ascend/descend which I'll attempt to explain.

Fireworks

Let us take Fireworks first.

Rotation of the Earth

Dubay doesn't explicitly talk about this in this proof

As usual Dubay does not bother to do any actual calculations, so I’ll calculate the speed differences for him.  To keep the maths simple let’s just assume that the Earth is a perfect sphere.

The spherical Earth revolves at  0.0042 degrees per second.
Lets say that a large firework shell takes 4 seconds to reach its apex.  That makes an angular difference of 0.0168 degrees difference from where the firework ignites in the sky on a stationary Earth compared to a rotating Earth.

Not something that you would expect to see.

Rotation of the atmosphere

When considering the rotation of the Earth, we ignored the effect of the rotating atmosphere.  This would be the case if the atmosphere was moving at the same speed at ground level as at altitude because no sideways force would be exerted on the firework as it ascended.

However is we assume,  that the atmosphere is moving faster in the same direction as the Earth as the firework ascends, then the atmosphere will be exerting a force on the firework in direction of the Earth's spin as the firework ascends.

This allows the firework to "keep up" with the rotating Earth more than it would if we had ignored the effect of the atmosphere.

I.e. the angular difference would be even less, and consequently even less noticeable.


Maybe Dubay thinks we would notice the sideways velocity increase of the firework as it ascends.

The largest firework shell reached a height of 2,700 feet.
The radius of the Earth is 3,959 miles = 20,903,520 feet.
The circumference would then be = 2 π r = 131,340,690 feet
At 2,700 feet higher in altitude, the circumference is 131,357,654

That is a percentage increase of 0.01% which would also be the percentage increase in the speed of the atmosphere.  Hardly enough to expect any noticeable effect.

Rain/Rain clouds

The only effect that I can think of is that Dubay thinks that we would notice clouds racing across the sky at some improbable speed on a spherical Earth.

Rain clouds (Nimbus clouds) are found to an altitude of about 9,800 feet.  Using the same calculation as I did for the fireworks, the difference in velocity for these clouds would be 0.05%.  Again hardly enough to expect any noticeable effect.

Hot-air Balloons

Although the record altitude for a Hot-air balloon in 68,986 feet, balloons do not typically fly higher than 2000 feet. 

Again using the same calculation, that would be a velocity difference of  0.01%.

So once again, Dubay is shown to be making ill thought out, unsubstantiated and false claims.


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